When people hear the term ‘search engine optimization’ they often assume it to be some intimidating algorithm that can often make people want to run and hide. But once given the chance, you can discover that search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredible tool that increases brand awareness and can even be kind of fun too. Today, I will provide insight into what SEO is, my involvement working as a marketing intern, as well as my experience navigating the intricacies of SEO. So, let’s dive in!
"Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving website traffic to help a site rank higher on the results page of Google, Bing, or other search engines." This is a fancy way of saying SEO can help drive traffic to your website or blog, meaning SEO = more chances of visitors being exposed to your brand, which = success.
I am fortunate enough to be able to get paid to strengthen my knowledge on marketing and SEO through an internship at CoSchedule. CoSchedule provides an easy to use marketing editorial calendar for all your organizational needs in one easy to use platform. Under the direction of my supervisors, I've gained valuable insight into SEO that I'll be able to carry with me as I venture into my future career post-graduation.
As mentioned, SEO can seem daunting at first partly due because you hear “coding knowledge is a plus” as well as some of the terminology involved. For some people, the coding part can scare them away quickly. But good news! Coding is hardly even part of the job, if at all. For the internship, I’ve never had to do anything coding related. For a full-time position, there may be some involved, but all that’s useful in knowing is a basic understanding of HTML/CSS. This comes into play when you want to manually rewrite part of your website’s code to load faster.
More than anything, WordPress is the biggest thing I’ve learned so far. WordPress is an open-source website builder, meaning anyone can use it and it costs you nothing. Primarily, WordPress is used for blogs which is a lot of the optimizing I do. The nice thing about WordPress is that anyone can learn it as long as they put in the effort- you don’t have to be a computer wiz to figure it out.
Some of the core things about SEO itself I’ve learned comes from optimizing blog posts and webpages as mentioned. To begin this process, you start with a checklist of things to complete such as:
Image optimization
Title width
Meta description
Backlinking
Image optimization comes down to ensuring the image’s file name is descriptive (short and sweet) as well as using hyphens between each word. Then you write “alt text” for each image, describing the image in further detail. This alt text is for those who are visually impaired and cannot see, so the computer reads this alt text that describes the image for them. You then write captions, which is a basic summary of the image that appears underneath the image. Inputting all this information basically says to Google “hey, all these images are cool!” and typically helps you rank better when the keyword is searched.
Title width and meta descriptions are about making sure that there aren’t too many or too little characters. You’ll want to place your keyword into both of these.
Backlinking is a process of linking your blog in older blogs to drive traffic to the new blog.
And there you have it! There’s some of the very basics of SEO as an intern in my experience. Pretty simple, right? Keep in mind, not all SEO jobs are identical. But hopefully this gives you a basic idea of what it’s like as an intern and sparks your interest even more!
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